The "Middle East and Terrorism" Blog was created in order to supply information about the implication of Arab countries and Iran in terrorism all over the world. Most of the articles in the blog are the result of objective scientific research or articles written by senior journalists.

From the Ethics of the Fathers: "He [Rabbi Tarfon] used to say, it is not incumbent upon you to complete the task, but you are not exempt from undertaking it."

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Monday, August 6, 2018

The Trump administration targets Hamas - Caroline Glick

​by Caroline Glick

Kushner, Greenblatt and Friedman acknowledged as well that “the international community also bears some blame.”

Last week, President Donald Trump’s Middle East team signaled a shift
in the administration’s policy for contending with Hamas-controlled
Gaza — one no prior administration had the courage to make.

On July 19, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner, his
special representative for international negotiations Jason Greenblatt,
and U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman published a joint op-ed in the Washington Post in
which they made clear that they are walking away from their earlier
efforts to rebuild Gaza’s economy as a means of advancing the prospects
for a broader peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

(This columnist had argued for exactly that policy just two days before.)

Noting that the blame for Gaza’s humanitarian crisis rests squarely on the shoulders of the Hamas regime, the three wrote:

International donors are conflicted: Should they try to
help the people directly, at the certain risk of enriching terrorists,
or withhold funding to Hamas and watch the people it is supposed to
govern suffer? In the past, investments in badly needed infrastructure
have been diverted for weapons and other malign uses, and even the
projects that are built are often destroyed as a consequence of Hamas’
aggression. Until governance changes or Hamas recognizes the state of
Israel, abides by previous diplomatic agreements and renounces violence,
there is no good option.

Kushner, Greenblatt and Friedman acknowledged as well that “the international community also bears some blame.”

“More countries want to simply talk and condemn than are willing to
confront reality, propose realistic solutions and write meaningful
checks,” they wrote.

The President’s Middle East policy team concluded by noting that the
time has come for the international community to base its policy towards
Gaza on reality rather than platitudes. In their words, Hamas is the
root cause of the endless rounds of war with Israel and the suffering of
the people in Gaza.

“Hamas leadership is holding the Palestinians of Gaza captive,” they explained.

“This problem must be recognized and resolved or we will witness yet another disastrous cycle [of war].”

The only inaccuracy in the Trump team’s analysis is their claim that
so long as Hamas refuses to abandon its war against Israel, “there is no
good option” for easing the suffering of the residents of Gaza and
advancing the cause of peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

There is a very good option for achieving both objectives. And like
the administration’s assessment of the true obstacle to peace, it is
based on reality.

The way to accomplish both objectives is to advance along the
trajectory of the work the Trump administration is already doing at the
United Nations. That work was spelled out in a second op-ed that
Kushner, Greenblatt and Friedman co-authored with UN Ambassador Nikki
Haley on Sunday at CNN.com.

In the second article, the four senior administration officials
argued that due to the spotlight the Trump administration has shone on
the UN’s institutional anti-Israel bias, the ground is beginning to
shift at Turtle Bay.

Specifically, the four applauded a UN General Assembly vote last
month on an American amendment to an anti-Israel resolution put forward
by Tunisia. The U.S. amendment specifically singled Hamas out for
condemnation for its responsibility in fomenting the past three months
of violence along Gaza’s border with Israel. It was the first time that
Hamas was specifically condemned in a General Assembly resolution. And
more member nations voted for the U.S. amendment than against it.

Although the amendment was dropped for technical reasons, in their
words, “For the first time in the United Nations, more nations than not
acknowledged that peace between Israel and the Palestinian people must
be built on a foundation of truth regarding Hamas. … And part of that
reality is recognizing the primary responsibility Hamas bears in
perpetuating the suffering of the people of Gaza.”

The four presented the vote tally as a “paradigm shift” in the way the UN treats Israel.

They may have overstated the vote’s significance. But it is certainly
worth checking if there can be practical benefits to the incipient
willingness of a significant number of member nations to revisit their
automatic opposition to Israel and support for the Palestinians in their
70-year war to destroy Israel.

That brings us back to the Hamas terror regime and the humanitarian disaster it has caused in Gaza.

As Kushner, Greenblatt and Friedman noted in their Post article,
“Despite the billions of dollars invested for the benefit of
Palestinians in Gaza over the past 70 years, 53 percent of the people
there live below the poverty level, and the unemployment rate is a
crippling 49 percent.”

According to the UN,
Gaza’s total population is 1.9 million. Of those, 1.3 million Gazans,
or 68 percent of the population, are registered as refugees with the
U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the UN agency responsible for the
Palestinians.

In other words, nearly 70 percent of Gazans are effectively wards of
the UN — just as much, if not more, than they are captives of Hamas.

UNRWA was founded in the wake of the pan-Arab invasion of Israel in
1948-49. Although it is presented as a refugee aid agency, UNRWA was set
up to prevent the Arab refugees who left Israel during the course of
that invasion from being resettled by the UN High Commissioner for
Refugees, the UN agency established to help refugees worldwide to be
resettled in new lands.

UNRWA’s purpose, since its inception, has been to perpetuate the suffering of the Arabswho
left Israel in 1948 and 1949 and their descendants. While the State
Department is reportedly refusing to make public its determination that
there are a mere 20,000 Arabs alive today who left Israel during that invasion, UNRWA today is responsible for supporting more than 5 million “Palestinian refugees.”

This is the case because for four generations, descendants of those
that left Israel have been registered as UNRWA refugees. As such, they
have been denied the rights granted
to refugees under the 1951 Refugee Convention, which relates to all
refugees registered with the UNHCR. Those rights include the right to be
granted asylum in a third country.

The first step to solving the humanitarian crisis in Gaza – while
weakening the Hamas terror regime – involves enabling UNRWA-registered
refugees to receive the rights conferred on all refugees under the
Refugee Convention. In other words, the Palestinians should be granted
the right to be resettled and naturalized in third countries. According
to the past decade of polling data, more than half of the population of Gaza wishes
to emigrate. But due to UN discrimination against Palestinians, they
are barred from doing so, and are doomed instead to hopeless lives as
captives of Hamas.

While working to end the UN’s institutional discrimination against
Palestinians, the administration should strongly encourage the Egyptian
government to permit the UNRWA-registered refugees in Gaza to leave the
region through the Gaza border with Egypt. The Egyptians and the
administration should work with third countries to enable the Gazan
emigrés to receive asylum, in accordance with the Refugee Convention.

By permitting the refugees of Gaza to resettle, the U.S. would advance the cause of peace and regional security in several ways.

First, it would right the historic wrong done to the people of Gaza,
who have been denied the basic rights of all refugee groups.

Second, it would end the ongoing Palestinian delusion, propagated by
Palestinian leaders and advanced by anti-Israel groups in the West, that
these fifth-generation “refugees” will one day “return” to Israel and
so destroy the Jewish state.

The centrality of the belief that Israel will be destroyed and
overrun to Palestinian identity was demonstrated graphically at a rally
in Gaza on July 12. At the event, which was televised on Qatar’s al
Jazeera network, Fathi Hammad, a senior Hamas apparatchik, told the
crowd that by 2022, “the cleansing of Palestine of the filth of the
Jews, and their uprooting from it,” would take place.

He added that “after the nation has been healed of its cancer – the Jews – Allah willing,” the “Caliphate will be established.”

As Kushner, Greenblatt and Friedman noted, the largest obstacle to
peace between Israel and the Palestinians is the Palestinian
leadership’s refusal to come to terms with the fact that Israel is a
permanent reality. This delusion stands at the base of the Palestinians’
conviction that it is reasonable to dedicate their lives to working
towards Israel’s destruction.

By enabling the Gazans who are registered as refugees with UNRWA to
emigrate to third countries, the U.S. and its partners will end this
delusion by providing the people of Gaza with an option for a better
life.

Finally, by facilitating the emigration of Hamas’s captive
population, the U.S. would vastly diminish Hamas’s capacity to threaten
Israel and to use terror and violence against it.

Hamas’s most dangerous weapon in its war against Israel is not its
arsenal of missiles, mortar, and rockets. It isn’t its infrastructure
of subterranean attack tunnels that traverse Gaza’s border with Israel.
It isn’t its inventory of arson kites and balloons, which it has used in
recent months to burn large swathes of southern Israel.

Hamas’s most dangerous, lethal weapon is its captive civilian population. It uses them as human shields.

The exploitation and deliberate imperilment of civilians forms the foundation of all of Hamas’s terror operations.

By enabling Hamas’s captives to emigrate, the U.S. would degrade, if
not destroy outright, Hamas’s most formidable weapon in its never-ending
war against Israel.

The administration is to be congratulated for its determination to
base its policies on reality. This alone distinguishes it from the past
three administrations who preferred wishful thinking to fact.

Reality demonstrates that long-held convictions regarding the shape
of future peace between Israel and its Palestinian neighbors were
utterly unhinged. But it also opens new options for moving forward.

The most important of those options is to end five generations of UN
discrimination against the Palestinians, and to permit them to emigrate
and be granted citizenship in new lands, instead of being doomed to
eternity as pawns in an endless war to annihilate Israel.